An interesting account of one persons experience with Godaddy and WordPress Hosting.

Continual frustrations, annoyances and poor value for my money

I switched from my old hosting provider (Godaddy), to WordPress.com because Godaddy was giving me issues every other week, or had caching issues, and did not support gzip (fully) etc. Plus the $5/month I was paying was not worth it.

via Why I switched from Godaddy (WordPress.org) to WordPress.com « one cool site.

Also: a related discussion about SEO and WordPress.com. Interesting opinions on pros and cons of keeping a simple site at wordpress.com in order to improve SEO.

> Read my other Godaddy related posts
> Read about myWordPress Hosting service

Web-based tools

Google AdWords Keyword Tool
This tool helps you evaluate the usefulness of keywords and helps you find related terms for your WordPress based site.  Just input a series of search terms and the Keyword tool tells you how many people searched for those terms, and  related terms, (globally and locally).  Sort by keyword, number of searches or competition. searches measures Competition measures how many people are actively marketing on that term through Google Adwords. It gives you an idea of how difficult it might be to rank for that particular term. Try out the  exact match and phrase match features also, as it can increase / decrease the search volume dramatically.

Google Insights for Search
Rank keywords against one another and lets you see their performance over time: Some search terms are more useful to your business than others, and search term values can change over time.  In terms of SEO marketing,  it can be a great strategy to rank for a keyword which is starting a meteoric rise – but only if it’s relevant to your content of course.

For example, if you are the only cell phone accessory store with content about the iPhone the week the iPhone is announced, and your site is equipped to close sales, you’ll likely draw a lot of traffic and sell a lot of product.

read about more Tools To Improve Your Online Marketing Campaign by Yoast

WordPress SEO Plugins

• WordPress SEO Plugin: this revolutionary plugin has a variety of tools to help you analyse your pages and posts as you build them. The powerful SEO tools are right there in the editor and they include many educational tips as well.
• Redirection: This one lets you add redirections manually – from an old url to a new one. Avoiding broken links and properly setting up 301 redirects is important to keeping your SEO rank when changing your site’s link structure.
• Permalink Finder: This clenver plugin automatically redirects your old urls to your new ones based on keywords in the url. For the right situations this could save you many hours of rebuilding links manually.

eCC
http://www.webgility.com
Free for 15 days. Then starts at $99 +$20/mo

Summary: QuickBooks integration application designed to deliver a comprehensive eCommerce management solution:

• Keep your QuickBooks current and accurate
• Streamline order fulfillment
• Manage product catalog, inventory & pricing
• Securely maintain your data

Ari coments: looks powerful. This tool works with 13 different ecommerce systems – WPEC is just one. So that’s a sign they are serious developers. Might solve complex inventory issues but I’m not sure how helpful it is if you don’t use quickbooks? Does lots of other stuff including integrating with a iPhone app.

See also this video that is WordPress-specific:
http://www.webgility.com/quickbooks-integration-word-press.php

StoreApps – “smart manager”
Free “lite” version or $100 “pro” version

Summary: “will boost your productivity 10x in managing products, customers and orders.”

You can browse, search, add, update and delete multiple products, customers or orders using a familiar, single page, spreadsheet-like interface.

Their site has videos and more… View screenshots of new version.

They also have a new “smart reporting” tool… But little info is available online yet. Looks like their website is out of date.

Manual Ordering
au$65 (@us$63)
This solution allows store owners to process sales immediately where a customer prefers to call in/mail order and gets around the inconvenience of creating a new customer order through the Checkout page.

Ari coments: this might be an interesting solution for a POS (point of sale ecommerce) system in a physical store. Check out the screenshots:
http://www.visser.com.au/wp-ecommerce/plugins/manual-ordering
Note that this guy (visser) makes lots of WPEC plugins so I trust him that he knows what he’s doing – he’s an expert at WordPress e-commerce.

NoStock: A stock notifier
Free – but may not work with wpec 3.8
When a product is out of stock, customer will see a button to request notification. Plugin will record email address in a list and when the quantity is updated (the product is back in stock), anybody that requested notification will get sent an email.
http://getshopped.org/fpt-plugins/wp-nostock-a-stock-notifier-plugin
http://fusionized.com/2011/02/announce-nostock-a-stock-notifier-for-wp-e-commerce

WPEC Bulk Tools
Free – but does not work with wpec 3.8
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wpec-bulk-tools
WPEC Bulk Tools provides bulk management tools for the WP e-Commerce plugin. actually 3.8 has this kind of bulk import “You can import your products from a comma delimited text file”

via: Vulnerability in TimThumb WordPress Plugins – The Effects – Security Labs.

Read more about how to fix this issue at wpcandy. I found that many themes use the filename “thumb.php” so watch for that.

Note: you MUST delete timthumb or upgrade timthumb ASAP. AND you should still scan your files AND change your passwords. More helpful links:

• TimThumb 0-day vulnerability
• Affected themes
• SuperDomain information
• SuperDomain followup
• You can scan your site, free, at http://sitecheck.sucuri.net/scanner (It is safe to check, but I think this will only check if  your site has been hacked – not if this vulnerability is there)

Hanging out with Matt at the end of WordCampSF 2011

One framework to rule them…

One idea I had recently (and discussed with Ryan of WPCandy and others at WordCampsf2011) was to create a WordPress theme framework review site. I’d like to present this idea here and see if anyone is interested in pursuing this idea with me.

Some final notes on WordCamp

• When you need custom bits of data to be attached to a post or any custom content type:  magic fields or Custom field template
• Both feature duplicatable fields – so users can add more and more of the stuff they want.
• Ajax Force Comment Preview: also helps prevents spam
• Every month, THINKademic will develop a free brochure type web site for a deserving non profit that is trying do something good in the world.
• User management: Role Scoper , Extended Super Admin and Members plugins (managing roles and users)
• Basetrack theme: posts are geotagged and displayed on a timeline. alot of “wow” features in this one and a powerful social message behind its development.
• 2011 (the theme and I suppose also the year itself) surprised me with its responsive web design
• Slides on WordPress as a CMS with great plugin tips:
• Pressfs: a file system for WordPress
• Document revisions (beta)
• Interesting test case: globalshakespeares.org

Social is a new WordPress plugin that makes it easier for you to connect your WordPress site to other social web networks.

via WordPress + Twitter + Facebook = Social : alexking.org.

Lots of great conversations and presentations. Here’s some notes and links…

2 apps for converting a WordPress site to a mobile app. Curiously, they both seem to come from Israeli startups. There’s an entrepreneurial flavor to the fallafel I suppose.

• wiziapp.com: not free and iOS only
• uppsite.com: Free and connects to Anroid as well as iOS. Windows coming soon.

A new plugin to show popular posts via Google Analytics

• pastebin.com/diff.php?i=ZhCja8Ga
• should be coming soon to WordPress repository
• Claims to work faster than existing plugins. I found this existing one: google-analytics-popular-posts but I hvae not tested it yet.

Themes for WPEC (comparative analytics coming soon): storefrontthemes.com

Project management and related tech tools: assembla.com

Tech support management: supportdetails.com

Site uptime test: downforeveryoneorjustme.com  (isup.me)
Note bad but I use  pingdom.com and www.site24x7.com

CSS framework: compass-style.org

CSS3 animations and other eye candy: iestelle.com/wordcampsf

Neat “zoomable” presentations: prezi.com

Tools for nonprofits:

• This is amazing: cure.org/curekids
  it connects “clients” of the nonprofit with donors. It’s just what a client of mine was recently asking for. It’s all built in WordPress but is not a pplugin that is ready to be easily put on other sites.
• And the same developers just releassed this great plugin: wordpress.org/extend/plugins/personal-fundraiser it’s about letting fundraisers make a personal page where they can attract and track donors from their personal circle. looks really great, can’t wait to try it. It is a plugin, ready to install although still kinda in beta.
• These guys soo great wed development for nonprofits: exygy.com
• I learned what a “Benefit” Corp is: wikipedia.org/wiki/B_corporation

If you want a fully integrated solution then a WordPress plugin might be a great option. You get all the power of a WordPress site without having to tack on the store with a separate software package (like Magento).

WP e-Commerce (WPEC)
This group is doing something great by offering the basic code as a free plugin. You’ll need to pay to have a fully featured store but by offering the free option they are sticking closer to the spirit of Open Source software and, most importantly, the plugin will get more community testing and input so that’s a good recipe to grow strong over time. I have

I have used WP e-Commerce for 3 projects. It’s far from perfect. There are bugs and the code is rapidly evolving so that takes time to keep up with. But to me it seems to be the platform with the most momentum behind it.

Some useful features I’ve come across:

• Different pricing (and stock control) for variations of one product
• Tax options are strong but do not support tax variations by city. That is a big issue here in California. there is a new paid subscription option to solve this issue offered by TaxNOW but it’s really expensive at $.50 per transaction – that is what they charge to calculate tax for you.
• there are 18 free plugins and more paid ones out there.
• Lots of shipping integration options
• Lots of gateway connection options

Other Options: 

Gravity Forms
If you just need an order form but not a whole shopping cart then this is a really simple solution that can easily accept and manipulate other kinds of non-purchase information since it’s got all the easy-to-use form building elements right there. You can even make ‘buy now” buttons that will prepopulate the form form other pages (although not like a cart where it will remember those settings from one page reload to the next). Gravity forms can do fancy things like connect to a MailChimp account so users can automatically sign up for a mailing list. Or even turn a purchase into a post – that would take lots of work to do in a real ecommerce system. This solution is limited to a fairly small number of products although if you can design a compact form or split the form into pages (a built in feature) then “small” could mean hundreds of products. Payment gets finalized at PayPal.

Examples of how I’ve used this tool:

• A simple Gravity Forms order form/store
• A donation form that allows for extra information to be captured

Shopp
Seems to be the main competition to WPEC. There is no free version. I see an equal number of complaints about bugs but I have never used it.

PHPurchase
This one lets you enter some products and easily add a “Buy Now” button you can put on any page. It doesn’t have category-based layouts so it’s not really for managing a full store. There are a few plugins out there that will automatically generate PayPal buttons also.

Jigo
This is a new offering. These folks were tired of working with Shopp so made their own system. Seems feature rich for a 1.0 version but I have no experience with it.

Some lists to learn more

• 10 best WordPress Plugin for ecommerce via Gaea
• Another top 10 list via speckboy
• 5 nicely detailed reviews via sixrevisions.com
• Compariosn notes on WP ecommerce plugins

I will report soon on how (and how well) this feature works as more data is gathered but for now my big tip is that you have to enable the “New Version” of google Analtyics in order to even see the speed reports. I spent some time banging my head against that brick wall – so now you don’t have to. Look for this:

The Site Speed report measures the page load time (latency) for a sample of pageviews on your website pages. It appears in the Content section of the Analytics reports. With this report, you can see which pages load the fastest and which ones are slower. You can also analyze your overall site speed along other important dimensions in order to learn how your site speed relates to a variety of factors.

via Site Speed – Analytics Help.

The cache will still serve the old ip address of the site, even if the DNS server already has the new ip address in its configuration. To override the cache, and request the latest information with the authoritive DNS server, you can flush the DNS cache.It will quickly rebuild itself

To flush (or empty/delete) the DNS cache, open a Terminal window and enter the following command: sudo dscacheutil -flushdns

note that “sudo dscacheutil -flushdns” does not work.

the old mac os command was
sudo lookupd -flushcache

but you will get a response of:
sudo: lookupd: command not found
with any Tiger OS (or older).

In Leopard, dscacheutil replaces most of lookupd‘s functionality. It allows you to do many things: flush or view caches, view Directory Service configuration information, and evaluate cache statistics.